[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #49222] octave-io 2.4.3: xls2oct with "OCT" interface lost the ability to read german umlauts or °

[Philip Nienhuis]

Follow-up Comment #14, bug #49222 (project octave):

@Markus,
I have no idea when JWE thinks it's time to release 4.2. But maybe we
shouldn't bother and just do our thing in our own time frame.

tidyxml.m (I couldn't think up a better name at the time :-) ) could have an
option to distinguish de- and re-coding, yes.
But I have no objections at all to rename it into utf82unicode and
unicode2utf8, in fact that might be a superior solution.

AFAICS all XML files in .xlsx (and .ods) have a first XML definitions line
mentioning the encoding, usually that is UTF8. A check + conditional call for
that is easy in principle but requires a bit of digging around in the general
OCT interface code to find out where to put it. I'd rather do that on a
subfile-by-subfile basis (subfiles = files in .xlsx archive) as long as I'm
not certain that all files in a .xlsx archive have the same encoding. The ECMA
docs are huge and I found that MS-Excel doesn't always conform to those.
Figuring out will probably take quite a bit of time and won't be ready in a
jiffy.

The .ods counterparts are easily patched (I think they already call tidyxml).
I have plans (and actually almost all code ready) to fold oct2xls/oct2ods into
one piece, same for xls2oct and ods2oct (and odsread/xlsread
xlswrite/odswrite), to simplify things for when they (ever) go to core
Octave.
ods2oct / oct2ods would be wrappers to their xls siblings then, similar for
the other pairs.

BTW: I found that also some of the Java-based interfaces portray the same
issues (POI / .xlsx and UNO). For now I'm only concerned about the OCT
interface as that deals with XML only. Once it works there I'll look at fixing
the other interfaces.

NB: I (and I suppose Andreas as well) really appreciate your quick fixes,
thanks very much!


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